Summit? What summit? Coverage of today’s Anglo-French tête–à–tête at Sandhurst can best be described as low-key on the French side of the Channel. And that’s being kind. To say the French don’t care may be a slight exaggeration, so let’s settle for Gallic indifference.
None of the newspapers cover the summit on their front pages and it was the seventh item on France’s equivalent of Radio 4’s Today programme this morning, sandwiched between a report on the Woody Allen allegations and the latest news from the Australian tennis Open. No analysis, little interest, just a brief mention that the president of the Republic will be in England for talks with the British Prime Minister. Whose name is Theresa May, just in case listeners didn’t know, and many don’t. I conducted a quick straw poll in my local market this morning as to the identify of Britain’s PM. The fruit and veg man produced the correct name, the butcher didn’t have a clue and the fishmonger got half a point for ‘it’s a woman’.
As for the Bayeux tapestry, that got barely a mention in the French media yesterday and what coverage there was bordered on the incredulous: only the British could get so excited about a tapestry depicting their greatest military defeat.
There’s undoubtedly been a mood shift in France vis-a-vis the British in recent months. They used to admire our foibles, envy our idiosyncrasies, describing them affectionately as ‘So British’. We were eccentric, we did things differently, and they seemed to work. Not now. What has received coverage in France recently is the NHS flu crisis and the collapse of Carillion. Then there’s the #metoo campaign, the resignation of Michael Fallon for…well, the French aren’t really sure why he went. All they know is that they’re relieved they don’t share their neighbours’ puritanism. An article in Wednesday’s Le Figaro was entitled: ‘France offers an example to the world in resisting Anglo-Saxon feminism!’, in which the writer, a French-Canadian, hailed France for standing up to the political correctness of the Anglophones.
In many ways, Macron is the figurehead of that resistance, an increasingly politically incorrect president who says what he likes and doesn’t mind who he offends. That’s one reasons the French are warming to him, but more than anything it’s what he’s doing to their international reputation.
Strange as they might find the British reaction to the loan of the tapestry, the French nonetheless understand why Macron did it.
It’s the same reason he presented Xi Jinping with a French thoroughbred from the elite French Republican Guard on his state visit to China this month; the same reason he was in the Gulf at the opening of the Louvre Abu Dhabi; the same reason he hosted Vladimir Putin at the Palace of Versailles and the same reason he invited Donald Trump to the Bastille Day parade.
Macron is reasserting French grandeur with symbolic gestures, showing to the world that France has history, culture and class. Why he is doing this? It’s his pitch to turn France into the major player in Europe now that Angela Merkel is on the slide. She’s old and worn-out, he’s young and tireless and he wants France to usurp Germany as the continent’s driving force. As for the British, whatever Macron might say in public, in private he must be delighted with Brexit because it removes a major obstacle to his ambitious olans.
Perhaps that was the real reason he decided to loan out the tapestry: a reward for making his life easier.
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